The only way to increase recycling is for governments to make it a legal requirement.

Hi all,

This is my first time using this website. Please help me to review my IELTS essay. Any advice will be helpful. Many thanks!
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Q:
Some people claim that not enough of the waste from homes is recycled. They say that the only way to increase recycling is for governments to make it a legal requirement.

To what extent do you think laws are needed to make people recycle more of their waste?

waste recycling and the law

Ans:
It is true that there is just a little amount of household waste be recycled. While some people criticise that the best way for government to increase recycling is make it a legal issue, from my perspective, I agree that regulations are not needed for recycling.

To begin with, there are several reasons why others hold the opinion that laws are required. Firstly, people tend to fear being punished. With punishments, such as fines, it is effective to make people recycle more waste. Another benefit of regulations on recycling is that there are clear guidelines for household to deal with the rubbish. Take one-time plastics for example, if there are fixed sigh and methods for how to recycle them, it is easier for families to recycle them. Therefore, the quantities of waste be recycled can be effectively risen.

On the other hand, personally I support the idea that governments do not need to put regulations on recycling waste. The most essential measure is to let people be aware of the impacts of rubbish. Only by realizing the reasons for recycling can people make their efforts to recycle more. Besides, recycling should be a voluntary activity of everybody. It is more efficient for people to recycle their household waste by self-control, rather than establish various regulations to improve recycling actions. Finally, instead of laws, governments can use motivations, like rewards, to stimulate recycling.

To sum up, perhaps laws on recycling of household waste are beneficial, however, I still believe that there are a variety of methods aside from regulations for governments to increase the amount of recycling.

Liu, the mistakes in your essay are highly evident to the trained eye. The mistakes that you made will actually pull down the score of the essay to the point where it may be questionable as to whether the presentation will pass the scoring criteria or not. I believe that you need to familiarize yourself with the various methods of discussing a Task 2 essay in order to improve because the main cause for your failure in this essay is that you did not properly discuss the prompt provided.

For starters, you did not properly restate the original prompt in your own words as expected. The first sentence of the opening paragraph needs to show that you understand what the discussion topic is about. The sentence after that, is the reason for the discussion. After that, is the discussion instruction that includes the thesis statement coming from your understanding of the prompt.

Rather than presenting the essay in the required manner for the TA section that is scored in the first paragraph, you dove directly into a discussion of the actual topic. That is a big violation of the opening paraphrase requirement and could garner you a failing TA score, which means you will not have much of a chance of passing the actual test. The proper presentation is as follows:

There is a belief that home trash does not get recycled because most people do not bother to recycle. That is why there is an opinion that in order to force homes to recycle more, the government should issue an order making recycling a legal requirement. I strongly agree with this statement for a number of reasons.

Based upon the response that you wrote, this should have been a single opinion presentation. Had you instead indicated that "I partially agree with this statement..." then you could have used a double point of view discussion for the essay.

By the way, the task 2 essay is always a 5 paragraph essay. Only the task 1 essay can come in at 4 paragraphs. Even if you wrote more than 250 words, if your discussions are not fully developed, as your paragraphs tend to be, then your C&C as well as GRA scores will also be affected negatively. So the final score will not be good for this essay at all.

I think it is a good essay generally. You made your opinion pretty clear that law is not the ONLY way to recycle more waste by listing other possible ways. I am convinced :). For an IELTS essay, I think you should avoid using "personally", because this is your essay, the whole thing is about you addressing your own opinion, so there's no need to say "personally". Hope this would help.

@Holt @Shuting
Thanks for reviewing my essay. Your suggestions are very helpful!!